Apple’s Tim Cook visits China to talk expansion, expansion, expansion

Apple sees China as a huge market that has plenty left to be tapped.

Apple CEO Tim Cook has been making good on his goal to grow Apple's presence in the Chinese market. Cook made a trip to China this week to meet with various executives and government officials, undoubtedly to push Apple's retail and mobile presence within the country. Though Cook's exact itinerary hasn't been made public, the world's largest mobile provider China Mobile has revealed that Cook paid the company a visit to discuss "matters of cooperation," according to Reuters.

In addition to his meeting with China Mobile, Cook also met with China Unicom and China's minister for industry and information technology and other high-ranking officials. And as noted by TheNextWeb, Cook has paid visits to various Apple resellers and has already confirmed that the iPad mini with cellular capabilities will launch in China by the end of January. (Currently, only the Wi-Fi version is available there.)

Cook said in an interview with Tencent Digital (English translation) and other Chinese news outlets that he expects Apple to have "far greater" than 25 of its own retail stores in mainland China and Hong Kong, but the company has learned since the launch of its first stores that the retail area needs to be much larger to serve more customers.

"Currently, Apple has 11 stores in the Greater China region, as well as many resellers. We will continue to expand in China and the number of retail stores we'll have will exceed 25," Cook was quoted saying.

Cook has long made visits to China as part of his previous position as COO. Since becoming CEO in 2011, however, Cook has spoken openly on fiscal calls about the company's ambitions in China, most recently highlighting that China made up ~15 percent of Apple's revenues for fiscal 2012 at $23.8 billion for the year. "[This] is really phenomenal when you think about it," Cook said during the company's fourth quarter conference call in October 2012. "That's up over $10 billion year on year."